Image: screenshot, Gears Studio
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"There's something ironic about Flappy Bird—perhaps not in Flappy Bird as a game, but in playing it," Juul said. "In a way, it seems too simple for you to possibly enjoy it. You expect it to have more stuff in it; the game just flies in the face of all the things you'd want to see in a modern video game.""But that's a kind of gesture to players," he added. "You see all those things that are missing. And yet at the same time, it still has the basic heart of video games: it's very challenging, and you're trying to take it as far as you can."That's where the insanity sets in. As video games become increasingly complex, the concept of failure therein becomes more nuanced to the point where it often becomes impossible to identify a single point in a game like Call of Duty or Skyrim where you made the one mistake that lead to your death. Even Candy Crush, with its fierce economy of turns given to clear the jelly or move some object to the bottom of the screen, is hard to parse in this way. Because the immense difficult is all there really is in Flappy Bird, all you have to focus on is why you messed up trying to clear that last pipe."You always think if you had just flapped one more time, you would have made it," Juul said. "And that's a big deal! The game is so punishing that you're forced to think about its mechanics in this incredibly minute way."That might sound obsessive. And, well, it is. But once you get used to Flappy Bird, there's something almost calming about playing it. It's so hard that you can't help but laugh at it. Juul told me that's an important part of what's built a de facto community around the game online—the "shared sense of facing an unreasonable death" that become "much more tolerable because you realize you're not the only one."Juul has been tracking casual games like Flappy Bird for too long to have any illusions about its staying power. Like Draw Something or FarmVille before it, Flappy Bird will inevitably be surpassed by something that's even more crushingly difficult or shamefully addictive. But for the time being, I'm gonna keep struggling through Flappy Bird as best I can. I still need to make it to ten points, after all.Whoever recommended Flappy Bird: Fuck you.
— Filipe Salgado (@philthe25th) January 27, 2014